The days of waterfall software development on a mainframe are coming to an end. It’s no longer tolerable for end users to have to wait two years for a new application to be written and delivered to a spec that, by then, is two years out of date. The inflexibility of the waterfall methodologies make them uncompetitive in the modern mainframe environment. What’s needed are the faster, more flexible, processes associated with Agile and DevOps ways of working. But what does an organization need to do in order to move from their old way of working to this new way – a way that can bring regular and frequent updates to any application to suit the needs of the users?

Mainframes are under siege. You might like to picture the mainframe department as some medieval castle surrounded by invading troops. There’s no actual fighting going on, but gradually the forces of distributed computing are waiting for the survivors inside the fortress to die of hunger (or in our case, retire through old age). One day, there will be no-one left to defend the castle – one day, there will be no-one left to run the mainframe.